PUMPKIN PATCH FUN

​Pumpkin patches are starting to pop up all over town! Our family always gets excited! Honestly, I don’t really know why but we love the “giant orange balls,” as my so used to call them. He used to get mad though when he’d run up to and it didn’t bounce!
 
Although, we’re lucky that we get to grow our own pumpkins, we still visit patches each year too. We love to play hunting games while there, and even though the kids are now 11 and 9, they still enjoy it.  (Or at least they they pretend to love it for my sake.)
 
Here are the two scavenger hunt type games I played at the farm earlier today:
 

1.  STEM FIND:  First of all, there’s just something silly about all the pumpkin stems.  No stem is the same! Can you find one that is green? Maybe one that is bigger than your hand? What about one with a few vine curlicues still? (Something cool to teach kids is that these curlicues are called tendrils and act like little hands as the pumpkin vine grows. They wrap around poles, sticks, or even weeds to help keep the vine stable. Neat huh?)

 

1.  CRAZY PUMPKIN:  It’s also fun to search and look around for crazy pumpkins.  Give yourself 30 or 60 seconds to find the smallest pumpkin in the patch.  Now, find the silliest looking one? Or maybe even find two pumpkins that are the exact same size?  You could even line pumpkins up from shortest to tallest! 

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